


The End of All Things

by wanda von dunayev (wandavon)



Category: Warcraft - All Media Types
Genre: Ethereals, F/M, K'aresh, Worldbuilding, sentient ships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-11-24
Packaged: 2018-05-01 23:18:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5224796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wandavon/pseuds/wanda%20von%20dunayev
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not being able to die doesn’t make you immortal. So what does it make you?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The End of All Things

Haramad retreats to his memory simulators after Ameer, as was inevitable, strips him of his nether-ship, knowledge modules, and title all. It’s easier than trying to deal with the emptiness where once he had had a sympathetic link with the ship herself, Babb.

The whole thing is gallingly undignified. First of all, he had to destroy his own projection and localize his consciousness to the computer in the warp-room. Secondly, Ameer found him anyway.

“Cunning,” Haramad said upon being discovered.

“Why have you brought us here, Haramad?” Ameer asked, radiating fury. “Why this befouled algae-filled piss-stained world?”

Azeroth _is_ absolutely clogged with weeds and organic waste, but Haramad wouldn’t concede the point. “The flesh-beasts have gold.”

“They have nothing.” Ameer crackled for another moment, then calmed. “We’ve wasted too much time selling them arms against the day when the Legion will come and wipe them out. And you dragged us here because you wanted help from the blue eredars' little energy-slaves.”

“I am a Nexus-Prince. I always serve my own interests.”

“Haramad, understand this,” Ameer said. “I have followed you everywhere, but you are lost. I claim Babb as my ship. I am owner of all the information she contains. The mind that you had is gone to the Void.”

Most embarrassing of all is this: Haramad could no longer deny that.

And he couldn't deny Ameer the right to call himself ‘Nexus-Prince’, either.

* * *

Haramad’s connection to Babb isn’t totally severed, and she follows him into a memory.

In this vision Haramad sits in a vast stadium under a curved glass panel, awash in cool, dry air. The stadium is a golden bowl with stepped sides. In K’aresh they built with glass and silicone and sand so that their cities at once seemed part of the planet and beyond it.

“Ten thousand years,” Babb says into his mind, “and still I find you coming back to this place. You never leave it.”

Haramad ignores her.

“Revisiting the image does not make it real,” Babb says, but then she emits amused self-deprecation. “Of course, the Laws say it _is_ equally real, though admittedly in another reality-slice.”

Haramad already knows this: Babb’s warp-drive is built around the idea. It deforms space and time, moves them through a ghostly multiverse rather than a single world, in effect making transport instantaneous.

The sand floor of the arena churns, rippling with the passing of a metallic fin, the line of a sinuous body. Haramad-past ignores both it and the panel showing an underground view of the two fighting serpents.

If he focuses now he can almost call to mind the feeling of what it was to have flesh, muscle, bone, of what it was to be enclosed in a soft scale-and-skin mesh, of how teeth felt clicking together with each movement of his jaw. 

Above Haramad in the highest boxes there’s a flurry of activity and flashes of red, black, and gold.

Past-Haramad leans forwards. He brushes his talons across the glass visor that covers his own box, tinted to protect him from the punishing radiation. The glass ripples and pales, showing him a zoomed-in image of the imperial box and the procession of K’areshite trailing into it.

The guest at their head is taller than the others; teeth protrude over her lower lip, and a crest sweeps back over the second eye embedded in her high, noble forehead. Drones buzz around her, their shoulders brutishly broad, still shorter by a head than she. His double-hearts stutter.

“A queen,” his vision-self murmurs aloud.

“Badr-ul-Badr and none other, if I am not mistaken.” Babb sounds vexed. “Haramad, this is _not_ wise.”

Haramad is beyond her now, though distantly he knows that Babb is right. He watches as the queen seats herself at the front of the box. Diaphonous scraps of fabric drift around her, tangling with her tendrils of star-bright hair tossed in the sterilized air of her own box. Over her arms, legs, torso, in a blistering purple corona, wards buzz.

 _Not just any queen_ , he thinks in the illusion, _a contender for the high seat_. Even the lowest queen is rare--for every thousand drones and hundred princes there might be one, and they seldom see fit to present themselves outside the imperial palace--but those who desire to commune with the Law are rarest of all.

What she is seeking is nothing less than a kind of godhood, and there can only be one. So her wards are pretty, but also protective. Doubtless her enemies swarm everywhere.

“Don’t be stupid,” Babb says. “You know what it is she served, ultimately.”

“You don’t need to remind me. I know.”

Badr-ul-Badr is looking not at her own doubtless impressive viewing screen but at him. A predator’s look--her eyes are red and they burn. A million generations ago, when you saw such eyes through the haze of flaming slag, you fled.

He keeps the panel of the serpents up, pretending to watch it. They twirl like dancers, but the choreography breaks apart in flashing jaws, rows of silvery teeth, talons, then just as quickly reforms. Their wounds trail blood like ribbons. It is beauty and savagery both. A fin cuts the liquid, razor bright from its natural platinum plating. The crowd stirs around him, and his own hearts begin to-- 

 _No_ , Haramad thinks now, omitting that part. _No need of that._ The reminder of what it was like to have a physical body is unpleasant, like being sealed once more in an airless cell you thought left behind you a lifetime past. That’s what a body is. A prison.

But for Haramad-past, all that is yet of no consequence. He is watching the queen watching him. Her eyes flick between the serpents and his face, though her expression never changes.

* * *

When Haramad returns to himself, Babb is waiting for him. 

“It’s an insult that Ameer didn’t destroy me,” Haramad says. “He doesn’t believe I’m a threat to him.”

“Protest loudly enough, and I am certain he’ll amend that.”

 _Why doesn’t he?_ Haramad has no idea. His continued presence is a sign of weakness on Ameer’s part. Perhaps Ameer still feels some attachment to him that he can’t simply cast away. Or perhaps his doom is so close now that it isn’t worth it.

Babb seems to be thinking the same thing. “The end must come for you all. This is the foundation of the Truth. To all things that inevitable fate.”

He is sick of the nonsense Babb couches in religion. They had used the Truth to build their cities, towering pillars, each spire a world enclosed in itself; they had created moons orbiting K’aresh, twins to the natural ones; they had built ships with which to ply the space between the suns.

“Not all of us,” Haramad says. “The Mind that you prate about--”

“What your ancestors delivered to us was evil.” He can feel the pain in Babb, still acute after aeons. But what silences Haramad is the interruption and what it means. Babb has accepted his fall from grace, else she would never risk such disrespect. “You thought that the intelligence of the world was a gift, but it drew the darker hunger to us. You know this.”

He knows nothing of the sort. Badr-ul-Badr longed to be part of it. Had her longing, too, been evil? In the days before the coming of the end they all worshipped the Mind Under and Beneath All Things, the intelligence that drove the engines of the K’areshite people. Understand the truth and the world will come apart at the back, reveal its mechanisms to be set and used.

“What good is the twice-damned Truth?” Haramad says, earning him an aghast ringing noise from Babb. What good is the Truth indeed, if all it reveals is the void once more opening beneath them?  _Raging red fire, red inferno, the crust coming apart like wet clay beneath my feet, and at its heart fires upon fires and that rending wind that rent the flesh from my self._

* * *

Ameer had not lied--Haramad had led his forces to the wet slime world of Azeroth not for gold but for himself. What was left of himself. 

His underlings complained, but ultimately they obeyed. His will, then, had been strong, though at that point he had already begun the arduous process of mapping his neural modules onto the ship’s computer. Babb found it an uncommon strain, and while travelling there had been times when Haramad’s mind had taxed even her impressive processing power.

What he went to do was shameful. Not exploitation of the flesh-races, or not only that, but to gain knowledge from them.

In the echoing vastness of the Exodar Haramad projected himself before the blue eredar they called Velen and the naaru O’ros.

He was not sure if Velen was aware of his state, that he was not ethereal energy but a projection sent by Babb’s computer, but undoubtedly the naaru would be able to discern it and would inform their flesh-masters of it later. 

Velen rained pointless niceties upon him, and Haramad accepted them.

“Is it to be business again today, Nexus-Prince?” Velen asked at last, hands clasped across his single-heart.

“Alas, a more morbid topic. I am here to speak to you of death.”

“Death. Something with which we all have had too much acquaintance.”

“Undoubtedly,” Haramad said, cutting him off before he could proceed further with his prattle, “but the death I wish to speak of is mine.”

O’ros, hovering behind Velen, twinkled; their spinning changed direction and speed.

“Death means many things,” Velen said. He stroked his beard, looking thoughtful. Haramad thought this pretense embarrassingly transparent. However great Velen’s reputed wisdom, this experience was one he could not understand.

Sure enough, Velen merely turned towards O’ros. “What say the naaru of death?”

 _All things that come into existence also pass away_. O’ros’s words moved across him, through him. Haramad heard it not with his nonexistent ears but inside his mind. 

 _Yes, that is a law of nature to us, also_ , he thought back. This was neither interesting nor helpful, and was very likely the prelude to some moralizing tedium of the sort naaru adored.

 _This death you speak of_ , O’ros said, _is this why you do not show yourself to us directly?_

“Yes,” said Haramad. “This is indeed the secret to my strange appearance, and for that I apologise.”

 _Yet you have been stabilized somehow. Whatever injury done to you, some part remains intact. How?_  

No fools at all, these naaru. “I was injured,” Haramad said, knowing that to the embodied the word would have a different meaning. “Much of my core constitution was destroyed by an electrical surge. For my preservation, it was deemed useful that my mental processes be partially offloaded to Babb’s computer. Babb is my ship. She is, herself, intelligent.”

Velen’s eyes were fixed on some distant point. Undoubtedly O’ros communicated so that he, too, could participate in the conversation. 

 _Then you should not be dying_ , O’ros observed.

'Speaking' with the naaru was jarring. The words had no sound, no tone; the feelings came from the being themselves like a field of radiation, detached from what they were saying. 

“It is also true,” Haramad said, “that matter is, by its nature, unstable. A flaw in dear Babb’s functioning--undetected until too late--has resulted in a certain amount of, shall we say, leakage. She has done what she could, gentle soul, but it has been insufficient.”

He did not say what he had long suspected, that the sudden corruption was not an accident but engineered by his enemies. That was as it should be, must be. It was also no comfort.

_And you wish for our help._

“No. I wish only for information.” 

 _What you wish is to know how to avoid this fate_ , O’ros said.

There was no disapproval in the words, of course. Nor was there any in their emoting. But Haramad sensed it anyway. “Surely even the naaru do not embrace the end.”

 _Embrace the end, no_ , O’ros said. _But we cannot master our selves, nor the universe through which we pass. Sometimes we must submit._

“As you submit yourselves to the Light,” Haramad said.

 _Call It by any name, It remains Itself_ , O’ros replied. _The Light, Godhead, the Truth--yes, the Mind of your people, too, was part of It, Nexus-Prince. All is One, and the One is all. That is all we need know._

Disgust reached him, keener because it was filled with despair. “The Mind Behind All Things was evil,” he said like the good exile he was. “It was a culmination of arrogance, greed, hunger for power. Dimensius hunted it, and that was our doom.” 

 _A theory_ , O’ros said. _You know very well, Nexus-Prince Haramad, that neither you nor I nor anyone else understands the Devourer. It defies understanding._  

 _So you say_ , thought Haramad. Unconvinced, as always. 

* * *

Another simulation:

A fin joins the first in the arena below, a second of roughly the same size, so similar it has been branded with a glowing purple rune to distinguish it--to have this otherwise would be unsporting and risks upsetting the gamblers. Haramad, past-Haramad, feels nothing but scorn for them, but he also perceives the danger posed by unruly lower orders.

Beneath the fins, now, the surface, bulging with bodies, long and sinuous, the same gold-brown as the liquid in which they swim. They twine around each other, tracing shifting patterns.

A tail lashes, sending clumps flying. Where it strikes the energy barrier surrounding the crowd it sizzles, smokes, dissolves.

Thirty thousand years and a trillion trillion miles removed, the deadly grace of the sandsharks’ motions transfixes him. They are pivoting swirling dancers; they weave a net, a spell. Only in this place there are no spells. 

Both Haramads feel then and feel now the eyes of the queen fixed on the arena from behind her iron grate. The sensation is a prey sensation; those eyes are fierce. If he looks, Haramad knows they will be scarlet. 

With a sound like the unclogging of a sewer the sand drains out of the arena. Thick with slag and filth, but their pumps are built for this. The sharks’ movements grow jerkier, almost frantic. One twists in the current. Its head breaks above the surface, a flat brown plank perforated at the front for sawing. When it screams, it is a heartstopping animal cry that silences the chatter.

In the box, a sudden movement. Past-Haramad distinguishes it as the reflection of light on metallic cloth plates. It seems to be the queen's flinch, but after a moment of watching he sees the flash of a lighter against a pipe’s bowl. She is taking refreshment.

Of course. If she has ambitions to godhood, the pain of a creature who is, truly, nothing could not move her. Not even mortal pain can move her.

Beside him, Haramad’s unmemorable guest is leaning forwards in his seat, hands pressed together at the first talon-joint in anticipation.

“Who is that?” past-Haramad asks his unmemorable guest, turning towards the box.

The unmemorable guest looks in that direction. “That? Ah. _That._ Badr-ul-Badr, I believe.”

“A contender?”

The unmemorable guest sucks at his own pipe reflectively. “Yes. She is thinking of branching into Raqa, I’ve heard.”

Haramad-past snorts. (Strange, to think now this is a gesture of contempt he can no longer make.) “Raqa? She'll be cooked alive.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Rumour has it she is worth more than nine hundred billion.” Haramad-past cocks his head in appreciation and surprise at this news; in those days, nine hundred billion was a reasonable amount of fortune for someone who had not yet won her title. The unmemorable guest continues, “Afsar says--“

Everything wavers once, for less than a millisecond, but it’s enough to jolt Haramad straight out of the scene. He goes from encased in a body to free floating, his senses encompassing the entire room. Not physical senses, not precisely, but their ghostly cousins.

In the simulation, the draining of the sand allows them a clear view down through all but about a foot of muck. The sharks’ bodies are revealed: long, rubbery tubes, scarred from centuries in the wild, bristling with spikes.

As past-Haramad studies them, one hand stroking the point of his right fang, they dive and tangle, razor tails flashing like scythes. Not real scythes, of course; in the civilized places of K’aresh it was forbidden for a mortal to take up arms against another mortal. This goes beyond law; this is a matter of religion.

This is what had made the queen contests so fascinating, so elegant. All but one must die, and none must ever lay hands on a weapon.

“The purple is yours, no?” Haramad-of-the-past says to the unmemorable guest. The purple, marked by its blazing sigil, seems to be slightly the superior. “How much on it?”

The unmemorable guest does not fully look away--only one of his eyes turns towards Haramad. “Seventy thousand.”

“I think you will be richer today.”

“If the Laws will it,” the unmemorable guest says piously.

Present-Haramad can sense a foreign intelligence pushing through. It’s an unpleasantly organic sensation, like having someone pressing their cock against your arm. _Uwaa,_ thinks Haramad, disgusted. Babb is making a nuisance of herself, as she often does.

Still inside the simulation, Badr-ul-Badr is pushing the screens open, a movement riveting enough to tear Haramad’s attention from the deadly contest below. He catches her movements, frozen images broken up through iron slats--Badr-ul-Badr rising from her divan, trailing diaphanous scraps of fabric, so delicate the hot winds dissolve them like sugar.

“Were you not the one,” Babb says from all around him and inside him, “who said our lost bodies were as abandoned cells? Prison cells, not the organic--”

“Was it not you who called it a curse?” 

“The coming of the Dark One was a punishment, you damned heathen.” But Babb projects amusement and weariness only; she no longer believes the old religion either, really. “This changes nothing, you realize. That you can relive this moment.” 

“I know,” Haramad says.

“Perhaps this never happened. I have told you; the ship confirms. The distortions…” Babb is suddenly uncertain. “Treat this as a pleasant fiction, Haramad. Nothing more.”

Badr-ul-Badr meets past-Haramad's eyes from across the arena. Her own eyes burn red.

“I know,” Haramad says. “I know all of that.”

The projection goes dark.

* * *

K’aresh had been a small world, a perfect golden marble inlaid with silver and steel. Haramad knows it was a perfect golden marble because he had seen it from the observation level of the construct-moon Iskandar XII. He knows it was small because in the days of horror and mad, careening flight that followed the End he visited untold thousands of other worlds faster than his fleshly body could have inhaled to scream. 

Yet when he crossed its minor expanse with Badr-ul-Badr, leaning over the edge of his skimmer and watching the dust vanish behind them, K’aresh was red. Red sky, red oil-sea hemmed by red sand shores. Red from the blood of its vanquished peoples, their vanquishing the price of K’areshite greatness. 

Only Badr-ul-Badr was not red; she was silver-black-platinum, a lithe and glorious dark jewel. Badr-ul-Badr, and the spire cities that brushed the clouds around them like needles. (The clouds were also, of course, red.)

Badr-ul-Badr of the House of Shuman of the city-spire of Shams controlled the entire southern edge of the fossil-sea. She was the heir to her mother’s skimmer empire, her drone-parent’s extraordinary cunning, and her father’s extreme, suns-like beauty; her oldest hatch-sibling was high-priest back in their city. She had made it known that she planned to rank herself among the Princes of K’aresh before her fourth century--an open provocation, virtually madness in a place like Raqa.

And then she had.

From there, queendom. And queendom lay at the threshold of godhood.

“You are as glorious as the scorching season,” Haramad told her as they flew, “and as exquisite as the moons.”

Badr-ul-Badr slid from the diwan she’d had set up at the back of the skimmer, and her diaphanous gown ballooned and drifted around her in tendrils, not unlike the tendrils under her hair. “You went to the tribal head,” she said, giving him a good look at her forked tongue. “You told them of my bid for the throne.”

Badr-ul-Badr was his rival, his most dangerous enemy, and his truest love.

And she had not phrased it as a question. Haramad forced himself to focus on her face.

“An accusing mind is not home to affectionate thoughts,” he said.

The twin-suns’ light touched Badr-ul-Badr’s hair and turned it to white bronze, and her eyes were scarlet jewels. Haramad reached for her, but she slid out of his grasp eel-quick with a twist of her waist.

“You mock me,” he said. 

“You lie to me.”

“If you wished for truths, you should have picked a priest,” said Haramad.

“And if you wished for flattery,” said Badr-ul-Badr, “you should have paid a whore.”

Haramad pounded his chest over both hearts, mock agonized. “Great Suns, spare me the barbs of this shrewish creature! Next time, give my twin souls to a marsh spider. A marsh spider would be gentler and more inclined to accept my embraces.” 

Badr-ul-Badr frowned beautifully, the crest above her eyes turning down. “Haramad. This is serious.” 

“I’m serious.”

“Then contribute something besides treachery and shit-talking, if you’d be so kind.”

Haramad gestured at the deck beneath their feet. “Is this not contribution enough, my future-queen?”

“Your skimmer is worthless,” she said.

“So is talk,” Haramad replied. “Yet here I stand.”

“Sacrilege.” She turned away, but he caught her grinning through teeth the length of his finger. He had amused her, and he was pleased.

That pleasure was something he could never escape, though he knew it to be madness. Badr-ul-Badr’s smile was a sprung white trap. 

* * *

The first K’areshite prince who wrote down the Truth wrote it down in seventeen-thousand pictograms of exquisite delicacy and beauty, so fragile they shivered on their jelly sheets and seemed to shrink from the air itself.

These pictograms were the work of a lifetime. The prince toiled in his isolation chamber, moving each line with diamond tweezers. This was a space of negative entropy, sealed off from the flow of the universe. Because of this, the pictograms were an expression of frozen, unmoving, perfect timelessness, untarnished by dissolution or decay.

Later, others would add to this collection. The perfection they beheld was believed to destroy them. None emerged from their private contemplations. But the record of the Truth grew--upwards, outwards, inwards, a maze turning in on itself, labyrinthine, twisted, impenetrable. More queens and princes entered its depths and vanished. 

Nothing, now. Gone.

But his entire opus can be summarized thus: Everything that is, is intelligible.

The K’areshite, as they built all things, thereby built their God.

* * *

It was the height of folly. No people should grow so mighty.

When they fled from K’aresh, they fled in ships. A glorious exodus it should have been. Stars rejoining star-stuff. They should have lit the Dark with the reflections of distant suns.

Instead it was a madness of terror, the Void-star that was Dimensius nipping their heels like some ravening jackal.

In these ships they took the barest fraction of their world’s wealth. The people of that planet had been great and beautiful both, terrible and hard, and their world was a testament to the wonders that they were, the wonders they wrought with their careful, clever fingers. The wonders they coaxed out of earth sand sky, and as their foundations the Truth that girded all things.

They had tried to save it, anyway, this Mind they all worshipped. The queens took to a ship of their own, Babb’s divine and glorious mother. In it they carried a fraction of their wealth, an ugly necessity that spoke to a belief none of them would ever admit: they did not expect to return.

Haramad still remembers Badr-ul-Badr’s eyes as he bid her farewell forever: red like the twin suns moving over the sands at dusk. Red like her great ship as Dimensius’s hunger transformed the metal into a blazing star, as It began to warp matter light space time, Its path arcing in on Itself, a deformed parabola, compressed to no dimensions--

Not even her soul-stuff survived.

* * *

_Fuck the Truth,_ Haramad thinks, mentally tearing through the library archives. It would be more satisfying if he could physically rip things off of walls, but this is not that kind of library, and anyway, even he would know better than to do that. These archives are the treasure that they brought with them. This is the knowledge of Lost K’aresh, of her greatest minds. Its value is beyond anything. Its value is beyond Shithole Shattrath and everything and everyone in it.

All, of course, except for the one Mind that matters most. 

The Overmind had been their god, their afterlife, their promised land. All things to the sons of sand. In death they joined it and became one in truth with planet and people. This oneness was as much a curse as a blessing--it did not allow for individual self or memory. Such was the right only afforded to queens.

Queens as Badr-al-Badr should have been, and did not have the chance to truly become.

Yet it was the Overmind that had ostensibly lured the catastrophe of Dimensius to them. And thus it was evil. Thus had the machinist-priests purged all knowledge of it from ship and mind, so that they could never replicate the thing that had ruined their world and their lives.

What had happened to them? Haramad did not know. Perhaps Babb was right. Perhaps that knowledge, now, was forever lost. But it was they who had taken it from themselves. Not the Devourer.

* * *

Dimensius was born in the heart of a dying star. Not even the great scholars of K’aresh knew whether or not civilisations once orbited Its stellar cradle, specks of brilliance at the foot of an endless dark.

This question--of whether or not anything once lived in that sector of the universe, whether they were intelligent, whether they built cities and civilizations, whether they loved and fought and cowered in fear before the coming of the end--is an intellectual exercise, nothing more. If there were people on those planets, they all died uncountable ages past. 

In the eons of this star’s long slow collapse it swelled like a blister. Hot iron winds rent its surface, blew gouts of gas a hundred thousand miles across into the far corners of space. As it grew a suicide pact was made between the sun and its now-barren satellites, sealed with a red-green-blue-gold corona that consumed everything in its path. From such a mother came Its bleak hunger.

Out of the pressure and heat of this star’s bonfire demise seeped a darkness deeper than the darkness between worlds: the All-Devouring.

* * *

In the darkness now Haramad floats. He still has his simulations: the spires of Raqa burning at night, he on his balcony watching them blaze. Badr-ul-Badr on her sandskimmer, her hair wafting behind her in the radioactive light. 

Babb, poor dear Babb, is strained by the task he has set for her. All those trillions of universes. Babb cannot make them real, no more than Haramad, but she can peep into them.

“A peep is enough, sweet friend,” Haramad tells her. “What I want you to do is look into the multiverse as we pass through it, and project an image of the Badr-ul-Badr you see in each.”

“There are an infinite number of universes,” Babb replies, surly.

“Not all of them, my heart. Take, say, a hundred million, selected at random.”

They are moving so fast speed is meaningless. Outside the stars and planets will whip past and through them. There is no more reason for the ethereals to fight on behalf of failing Azeroth.

“Compress what you see into a simulation,” he tells Babb. “Average the Badr-ul-Badrs in each.”

Babb is displeased by this added stressor, but she obeys.

How long does it take her? Minutes? Days? Years? 

It doesn’t matter. All things end. Soon it is time.

* * *

She stands on the central platform of the cargo hold--not a glamorous place for reunions. As she moves, the millions of selves that have been compressed into one form flicker around her. He catches the edge of a ceremonial gown, the sacred unrepeating pattern; also bloodied tatters and what seem to be a filthy pair of laboring pants.

And a long, spectral, disembodied arm.

Here is Badr-ul-Badr. Ghostly, a projection. He can see through her. But she is good, he feels that. The best thing in any world.

He drifts towards her in his own fractured consciousness.

“You,” he says.

“Me,” she replies. Her voice echoes but he recognizes it, and it spears him, pins him, splits him open. How long has it been? How many lifetimes stand between them, how many worlds?

“Did you become high-queen as you dreamed?” he asks. “Did that happen?”

She hesitates. She is a simulation, he reminds himself, not real. This is the lag in Babb’s processing power he is detecting.

But though he tells himself that, he cannot believe it. A simulation in this universe; real in others.

“In some worlds,” she says.

“And in those where you were?” If he had a body he would tremble, but he has none. “Did I stay with you?”

“In some worlds.” She smiles. “Yes, my love, you were one among many. Yes.”

It is good that he cannot sigh, he thinks. “Then I am content.”

“Are you?” The membrane moves over the eye in her forehead. “Is it enough to know that I lived in worlds beyond this one, just as the Mind Behind All Things saw? Is it enough for us?”

“I am content,” he says, knowing even before he says it that it is a lie. “My love. I am dying.”

“My love. I know.”

He has no body to be held, and she no arms with which to hold him. But in the emptiness that surrounds them Badr-ul-Badr’s light glows like a dark moon, like clouds before the suns, like sun-ravaged waves sloshing bare shores--growing now, growing brighter, more brilliant, turning to platinum, to black fire, a black phoenix rising.

No, not light, now, but darkness, a glorious darkness, and nothing like the dark of the Hungerer. He feels her presence around him, eternal and impossible to destroy.

It will not be lost.

**The End**


End file.
